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Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

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Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#121

Post by huebnerob »

njarboe wrote: post #69
rsync wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice." A whole year! Truly sage-like wisdom from the MoveFastBreakThings generation of technical development. It is simultaneously comical, exasperating and sad to watch this tragedy unfold. We will slowly build our own, moder…

I'm not sure where you live but in my country (USA, where these companies you are mocking operate) when a vehicle approaches the road and I am going highway speed, I get a bit nervous, cover the brake, and feel a nice sense of relaxing stress when I pass by. That other vehicle could do anything . 40,000 deaths a year and over a million world wide.

What you describe is called defensive driving, and it should be front-of-mind for everyone who gets behind the wheel.

My family always said about all the assholes on the road, you might be in the right, but you'll be dead right.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#122

Post by oldgradstudent »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #120
Animats wrote: post #116

"At first, Waymo-trained drivers will supervise our Waymo One vehicles." That's about where they've been for years now - almost autonomous, with a safety driver. Back in November, Waymo started sending some cars out without a safety driver. But they backed off on that.[1] I'm disappointed. I thought Waymo was ready to launch a real self-driving system. But no, not yet. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/waym…

According to the article on the verge, they are testing and will continue testing without human drivers via the Early Rider program.

Arstechnica[1] asked about it and Waymo did not deny:

> In fact, last week the Information's Amir Efrati reported that Waymo may actually have moved backward recently.

> "Within the past month or so, due to concerns about safety, the Alphabet company put so-called safety drivers back behind the wheel of its most advanced prototypes, ending a year-long period in which those people generally sat in the passenger or back seat," Efrati wrote.

> We asked Waymo about this, and a spokesperson dismissed the report as nothing new, saying that the company regularly changes the mix of cars with and without safety drivers.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/12/waymos-ambitious-plans-...

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#123

Post by creato »

a-wu wrote: post #84

I can’t wait for wheelchair accessible vehicles to be equipped with this technology. It looks like they’re using Chrysler Pacificas which already have wheelchair ramp conversions from VMI and Braun. Since the self driving equipment seems to be on the top of the vehicle, it seems trivial to mount it on a converted Pacifica. As a quadriplegic who doesn’t drive (yet), the possibilities with this excite me greatly.

> It looks like they’re using Chrysler Pacificas which already have wheelchair ramp conversions from VMI and Braun.

How common is this for other makes/models? If it is rare, I wonder if it influenced Google's choice of vehicle?

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#124

Post by jboy55 »

anonymousCar wrote: post #112
ehsankia wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the only way to know how well it's doing is for it to get enough "interesting" miles, and then compare the success rate of those miles to similar human-driven miles. Right now Waymo is past 8 million miles driven. Miles driven is a better and normalized metric, with comparable real world statistics, unlike time.

Waymo is past 8 million miles total, how many miles on the latest version of the software? Certainly there are new features that are there in the last half than the first half? I think miles count is a bad metric and if it wasn't, Tesla would be the front runner.

And how many of those miles are up and down 101 after midnight on weekdays?

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#125

Post by repsilat »

aantix wrote: post #45
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #5

I know this is a heated debate, but it's interesting to see the divergent approaches that are being taken to achieve self driving. In one corner, it's lidar-based, equipping vehicles produced by other companies, organically and incrementally growing the navigation technology. In the other, it's video-based with now 100s of thousands of vehicles feeding data to a massive neural net. Each has very well thought-out argu…

Curious; If you train a neural net to drive a car with X number of samples, and the car does something erratic, how do you determine which data item introduced the erratic behavior and how do you go about untraining that behavior?

That is one reason they don't do that. (Another is that the net would be useless if you upgraded the cameras...)

Whatever the sensing technology, everyone uses it to build a "state of the world" model which is then fed into algorithms for planning movement. Nobody (to my knowledge) just wires up input pixel neurons to output pedal neurons.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#126

Post by a-wu »

creato wrote: post #123
a-wu wrote: post #84

I can’t wait for wheelchair accessible vehicles to be equipped with this technology. It looks like they’re using Chrysler Pacificas which already have wheelchair ramp conversions from VMI and Braun. Since the self driving equipment seems to be on the top of the vehicle, it seems trivial to mount it on a converted Pacifica. As a quadriplegic who doesn’t drive (yet), the possibilities with this excite me greatly.

> It looks like they’re using Chrysler Pacificas which already have wheelchair ramp conversions from VMI and Braun. How common is this for other makes/models? If it is rare, I wonder if it influenced Google's choice of vehicle?

In terms of minivans, most American makes and models have conversions from at least one of the conversion manufacturers. Braun even has a converted Ford Explorer. The one issue I can see is that Waymo is using Pacifica Hybrids which can't be converted because the floor of converted vans is lowered ~12-14 inches which gets in the way of the batteries. But I can't imagine it would hurt to use a handful of gas-powered vehicles.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#127

Post by a-wu »

buboard wrote: post #119
a-wu wrote: post #84

I can’t wait for wheelchair accessible vehicles to be equipped with this technology. It looks like they’re using Chrysler Pacificas which already have wheelchair ramp conversions from VMI and Braun. Since the self driving equipment seems to be on the top of the vehicle, it seems trivial to mount it on a converted Pacifica. As a quadriplegic who doesn’t drive (yet), the possibilities with this excite me greatly.

Yeah i was hoping that waymo would make those a priority. It's a small market for smaller companies to invest in, but it should be very successful.

It would be huge for the wheelchair using community because while there's UberWAV and LyftAssist, those are contingent on someone owning a wheelchair accessible vehicle to start, which is rare. Uber is starting to partner with local paratransit companies but rollout is slow and doesn't offer great availability. A big advantage I can see with wheelchair accessible Waymos is that once they're comfortable running them without supervision, a wheelchair user could call them at all hours. Right now it's really hard to request paratransit service after-hours so my social life is pretty much restricted to daytime hours unless I have someone to drive my converted van.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#128

Post by dsfyu404ed »

creato wrote: post #123
a-wu wrote: post #84

I can’t wait for wheelchair accessible vehicles to be equipped with this technology. It looks like they’re using Chrysler Pacificas which already have wheelchair ramp conversions from VMI and Braun. Since the self driving equipment seems to be on the top of the vehicle, it seems trivial to mount it on a converted Pacifica. As a quadriplegic who doesn’t drive (yet), the possibilities with this excite me greatly.

> It looks like they’re using Chrysler Pacificas which already have wheelchair ramp conversions from VMI and Braun. How common is this for other makes/models? If it is rare, I wonder if it influenced Google's choice of vehicle?

Rear entry is probably going to have physical fitment issues depending on the amount of space in the chassis to work with. Minivans are pretty homogeneous now (it's not the late 80s anymore) so this isn't really an issue but I bet there's a model or two out there that are simply a no-go because some component that can't practically be relocated is in the way.

Side entry is going to be able to fit a wider range of vehicles because the installation is less invasive so you can support more vehicles for cheaper (kind of like how a static webpage can be viewed on basically anything but a fancy web app has a narrower range of browsers).

You can get a rear entry kit for pretty much every minivan that's on the market. You can get a side entry kit for that and more. I didn't bother checking but I know I've seen side entry but never rear entry kits on full size vans (also it makes sense that you can't put a rear entry kit on a full size van because there's a frame in the way).

Fundamentally you're limited by head room. You can't have people smashing their faces into the top of the door opening.

Google's choice was probably not influenced by the availability wheelchair van conversion kits.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#129

Post by notatoad »

I'm confused as to what they're actually launching here. If i'm reading correctly, their existing service which was branded as an "early rider" program has been renamed to "waymo one", but the service hasn't actually changed at all and is still limited to the same region and to existing users of the early rider program?

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#130

Post by jboy55 »

c2h5oh wrote: post #57
GeorgeO84 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical Update. You have 2 minutes to close all the windows and leave the car.

More like "critical update is being installed" signaled by the car hitting the breaks hard until full stop in the middle of a highway.

My "Windows Car" prediction,

"Oh shit I'm late to the airport!" Get in car, car says, "Critical Updates required before start, please wait 5 minutes". Then 30 minutes goes by, update is at 99%, "Finalizing".

When its done, you say, "Ok car, get me to the airport ASAP!". Car says, "Sorry, why we optimize the download, speed is limited to 30mph, The ETA to your destination, the airport, is NaN"

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